The tax rolls from the western villages arrived bundled with twine and excuses.
Every bailiff blamed weather. Every collector blamed wolves, road damage, poor yields, peasant dishonesty, or prior shortfalls inherited from the last collection season. Yet when Adrian and his clerk set the rolls against actual field counts, household inventories, and grain receipts, another pattern emerged.
Greyfen did not merely tax badly. It taxed dishonestly.
There was the lawful land due owed in grain or labor according to acreage and tenancy status. That part, while harsh, was at least legible.
Then came the additions.
Frontier maintenance surcharge.
Road watch surcharge.
Purity tithe supplemental.
Chapel lantern fee.
Winter defense reserve.
Emergency animal cull fund.
Forest danger insurance.
Some had once existed as temporary collections after raids or bad winters.
The county, like every dying structure, had discovered that temporary levies were easiest to keep if one renamed them often enough.
At Sedge village he ordered three years of collection sticks brought from the reeve's chest. The man protested until Adrian set the Bastion Exchange contract on the table beside them and began asking, mildly, whether the reeve preferred to answer about taxes or about treasonous correspondence carried on county roads. After that the sticks appeared quickly.
Each notch represented grain, labor days, or coin.
The commoners watched from beyond the yard fence, silent and bent-backed inside winter cloaks patched too many times. Adrian remembered peasant villages in the old world, not romanticized but seen plainly: places where any abstraction about production became obscene the moment one looked at a child's boots.
Julian's worn soles had angered him inside the keep.
Here half the children had feet wrapped in wool and cord because leather had become luxury.
He counted the notches. Recounted. Compared with the reeve's copied sheet.
The village had paid nearly one third beyond its legal due in the last year.
"Where did the surplus go?" Adrian asked.
The reeve swallowed. "Collected upward, my lord. Steward's office. Church wagon. Sometimes lord Berengar's men if they came with writ."
"And if you protested?"
The reeve laughed once with no mirth in it. "A reeve protests only once if he hopes to remain reeve."
Father Corren arrived before Adrian left the village.
Not alone, of course. He came with two lay brothers and a face arranged into pastoral concern. "I hear there is unrest over lawful contributions," he said. "My lord should take care. The ignorant are often made bitter by necessities they do not understand."
Adrian looked toward the church cart standing in the square. Its axle sat under a full load. Better loaded than the village barns.
"Explain to me," he said, "why the Church's supplemental purity tithe in Sedge tripled after the eastern line collapsed. Did sin increase with monster movement?"
Father Corren's mouth thinned. "The danger of corruption always rises where order weakens."
"Convenient."
"True."
Adrian stepped close enough that only the priest and the brothers heard his next words. "If the county were whole, Father, perhaps I would have left you your pieties and asked only that you preach them in tune. But Greyfen is starving under labels. I begin to suspect holiness here has become an accounting method."
Corren's eyes hardened. "Take care, my lord. Men have been broken by less reckless speech."
Adrian held his gaze. "And counties by more cautious ones."
On the ride back he drafted the first of his corrective orders.
All emergency levies not recorded under the old county law chest were suspended pending review.
No village reeve would surrender grain beyond legal due without sealed county instruction.
Any church collection above ordinary tithe required written itemization delivered to the keep.
Sir Roderic read the draft over the saddle pommel and gave him a look halfway between admiration and concern.
"This will anger the church, the branch house, and every collector fattened on confusion."
"Yes," Adrian said.
"Then why issue it now?"
He looked back toward Sedge, where the church cart was already rumbling out more heavily loaded than a priest's conscience should have been.
"Because a harvest is not only what the land yields," he said. "It is what reaches the winter without being stolen on the road."